How is number of units sold not meaningful, unless you’re talking about a company that can’t sell any?

Ron Miller

What I meant to say was that if demand exceeds supply, then saying how many sold is only saying how many Apple was able to make. I guess that is meaningful, but I think that knowing the demand is more interesting than knowing the supply.

From a reader’s standpoint, that’s probably true. But when we’re talking raw dollars & cents, nobody cares about what could be, only what is.

Most other manufacturers only quote SHIPPING numbers – which does not equate to sales. Apple does the opposite, so what they’re basically saying here is that we’re going to sell every single phone we can make. Some others make a ton of phones, and never end up selling them to end users – only to have to either buy them back from resellers or write them off as a loss.